Some very interesting thinking here - what about cooperatives made up of several small markets sited near residential hubs? Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
-----Original Message----- From: Jon Bosak <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:28:01 To: Sustainable Tompkins County listserv<[email protected]> Subject: Re: [SustainableTompkins] local food(in)security Simon St.Laurent wrote: > It's P&C's third bankruptcy within a few years - I think they have their > own crises. Well, yes. But they're not the only grocery chain to have fallen on hard times; it's a tough business to be in, and only the most efficient and ruthless survive. Which is why Wal-Mart has been so successful. > I have a few disagreements with Jon about the rest: > >> Second, I am (very reluctantly) coming to the conclusion that a >> return to local markets is off the table for most people in the >> county. I can see a few returning to certain neighborhoods in the >> city of Ithaca itself, but the energy already invested in the big >> box stores and the increasing cost of energy that would be >> required to replace them with something else means that we're >> probably stuck with them. > > If these were buildings meant for the ages, I'd find it easier > to agree, but they're largely piles of cinderblock with flat > roofs poorly suited to our climate and vast parking lots subject > to potholes. Remarkably, of course, people often tear down > buildings meant for the ages and patch up the junk, so that may > not matter. I don't think we're actually disagreeing here. Yes, the buildings are tilt-up junk with a projected lifetime of about 25 years. So we won't just be stuck with big box stores, we'll be stuck with crumbling big box stores. But I still think we're not going to have the energy available to construct an alternative. Or to be more accurate, we will have the energy, we just won't have an economic incentive to allocate it in that direction. > I think you're likely right about central markets remaining > important, though I suspect we'd return to something like the > city-village-hamlet- neighborhood structure of the days before > cars. The city would offer more of the items worth traveling > for weekly or monthly, while more local places would have the > staples worth getting daily. That's a different model that the > "local is exciting" I'm happy to support in brighter times, > though. I'd really like to think you're right about this, and maybe we can return to the model you describe if we can convince the villages and hamlets to concentrate more housing closer to their centers. But with the population distribution we've got now, it just doesn't appear to make sense either economically or from the standpoint of energy use. Take Danby (to cite a concrete example that might induce Joel to confirm or deny). It would be great to see a general store in Danby, but most people who count themselves residents of the hamlet don't actually live within easy walking distance of the center. And once you're in the car, it doesn't make sense to drive two miles to pay a substantial premium for your groceries when you can drive just a few miles farther to shop at Wegman's and get a much wider selection to boot. This remains true even if fuel prices rise; at some point you start putting more people in the car to split costs, but you still take the car. Someone please convince me that I'm wrong about this. > I also suspect that the nature of that central market will > change. Big boxes aren't merely about our willingness to drive > great distances to them. They also rely on very sophisticated > logistics systems to keep track of what's selling where, > ensuring that it gets replenished, and adjusting to changing > customer interests. These systems are amazing, but I'm far from > certain they'll be able to adapt to higher energy costs. Au contraire (and this is what started me rethinking all this in the first place). The vendor-managed and just-in-time (JIT) systems you're referring to exist because they increase efficiency and lower costs. In other words: they save energy. It's true that JIT systems also make their users more vulnerable to price and supply shocks, no doubt about it; but this just means that the big box operations that aren't quite as smart will fall to the ones that are (witness P&C again, or KMart's slow yielding of market share to Wal-Mart). So my hunch is that energy descent doesn't mean the death of the (crumbling) big box store, it just means that there will only be one of each type in a given area, and much more of the space in the box will be devoted to warehousing in order to buffer price and supply fluctuations. I also suspect (BTW) that instead of seeing electronic supply chain management fail, we'll see exactly the opposite: its democratization and adoption by the small businesses as well as the big ones. > That makes me suspect that while there will be central markets, > they won't necessarily be run by single large operations the way > Wal-Marts, Targets, or even Wegmans are now. There I hope you're right, and I think we could have this model if local planners could see clearly where we're headed. I won't try to describe a Latin American-style central market in detail here, but imagine the Farmer's Market moved downtown and arranged to house 2-3 times as many vendors in roughly the same space. Or for that matter, housed in one of the big boxes, though a downtown location would make vastly more sense in terms of access to public transit from all over the county. We're only a year or two away from free or very inexpensive electronic supply chain management systems that will allow the smallest vendor to compete on equal terms with the biggest; such systems are being deployed as we speak in places like Panama. This is the kind of "centralized relocalization" that makes the most practical sense to me right now. Jon _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins Questions about the list? ask [email protected] free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org _______________________________________________ For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins Questions about the list? ask [email protected] free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
